Teacher candidates navigating immigration discourses in a politically polarized era

This study examines how preservice teachers conceptualized immigration in their online posts in an undergraduate teacher education course in the southeastern United States. Guided by a Foucauldian poststructuralist framework, we understand that in a discursive field such as a teacher education classroom, there are always competing discourses that inform students’ performativity (Butler, J. (1999). Gender trouble: Feminism and the subversion of identity. 2nd ed. Routledge). Using critical discourse analysis and systemic functional linguistics, we analyzed the discursive stances toward immigration of 21 preservice teachers. We examined how their texts temporally negotiated, resisted and took up available discourses about race, nationality, legal status, and state policy. Our analysis identified three recurring discursive stances: pro-immigrant, conflicted, and anti-immigration stances. Each of these stances, however, included uneven and sometimes contradictory positions. Our findings show how broader immigration discourses circulate within teacher preparation and make particular subject positions available to future teachers – positions that may variously enable or constrain how they come to understand and respond to immigrant students. We conclude that teacher education programs need more explicit and critical engagement with immigration issues to support preservice teachers’ in expanding their sociopolitical understanding and ability to work thoughtfully with immigrant students.